Introduction
'V'irtual 'I'ntentional 'A'bundance 'A'ccess 'C'ommunity: A community using virtual connections to intentionally create or expose resource abundance, through zero-profit and bulk purchsing mechanisms directed by a digital resource manager, which the community may then use to increase sustainability levels and consequently raise living standards. Why use a VIAAC? There is nothing new about the idea of an entire community intentionally working together within the confines of a particular geographical area toward a common goal. The idea has existed in very many variations and incarnations, from business structures, to cults, to scientific experiments and even entertainment, and it is so thoroughly ingrained in human culture, because it is a trait that gives the species an advantage. We have understood for millennia that we are greater, united in purpose, than the sum of our parts. Yet, somehow we’ve managed to lose our way. Our social need for competition has rendered the dominant portion of most communities unwilling to co-operate with each other, with even the small variations of functional intentional communities having private intentions that are harmful to the balance of the rest of the system. Intentional communities , in their most literal sense today, are those communities attempting to unite individuals in order to find alternatives to the current socio-economic paradigm and all of them have the same geographical isolation-based limitations. Any given community requires a variable quantity of resources that are not available within their geographical location and must be sourced from elsewhere. Shipping and taxes, as well as supply chain value add-ons push prices past sustainability thresholds, and the communities become infeasible from an economic standpoint, often requiring higher and higher community ‘donations’ and ‘capital injections’, or the more likely decrease in quality of goods and services available to the given community, since all goods and services within the community are traded for external resources. The result is a repetitive cycle of people uniting, being thwarted by a systemic problem, and then parting without having identified the problem, leaving the next community to make the same set of mistakes, and the cycle just keeps repeating. Something’s gotta give. We are now, however, becoming firmly entrenched in the digital age, where a virtual universe grows exponentially every day. It is in this universe that the latest incarnations of the intentional communities have emerged. Through social networking and cloud computing, we are quickly establishing a myriad of communities that often do not require any particular geographical commonalities, but are still able to achieve a common goal. Examples like Kickstarter or Avaaz are just the tip of a very large ice-berg. But as yet, there has been no tangible move toward a Virtual Intentional Community linking to and governing a real-world community (that I know of). What is needed is a combination of the advantages of intentional community goals, with virtual intentional community de-limiting to produce a community model that can be applied anywhere (Even existing urban and suburban populations) so that a viable alternative to the current socio-economic model is available. My proposition is a Virtual Intentional Abundance Access Community.